Monday, June 16, 2008

No health insurance card necessary

Well, its been 2-3 weeks. Time to take her in for an ear check and make sure the ear infection is gone.

I received some recommendations for an English speaking pediatrician and made the call today. I booked an appointment for tomorrow morning at 9 am and was told to come early to fill out new patient paperwork.

Okay, par for the course so far. Typical new patient protocol.

Next thing I did was to email Brian and ask that he print out our temporary insurance cards so that I could take them with me tomorrow.

Well, he looked into it and, due to Aetna's timetable (longer than we would like, same as in the US), we won't have them until Wednesday. Shoot.

So I called the doctor's office back and let them know the situation so that we could reschedule.

And they said, "It's okay, we will see you tomorrow."

Huh?????

Yep, that's right. They are going to administer health care without proof of insurance.

I'm stunned. We had to show our health insurance card every time at our old pediatrician, even if the information hadn't changed. And if you didn't have it with you, sometimes the nurses would give you an attitude about it.

But there's a catch. There always is.

The doctor's office will bill us for the visit. We then have to pay them and submit the bill to insurance for reimbursement.

And not because we don't have our insurance cards. This is typical procedure for all doctor appointments we make here- pediatrician, dentist, etc.

3 comments:

Liz
said...

Don't worry most doctors only bill quarterly, so depending on when you see the doctor, it could be up to 3 months before you receive the bill! And if it is something really expensive, you can always break the payments up into manageable chunks.

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About Me

Relocated to Switzerland with my family, I enjoyed exploring life in a different country with my family for three years. We recently moved back to the US and are readjusting to life here while missing Switzerland and our friends there.